2010
6
Mar
Painter-turned-sculptor branches out – Cultural Olympiad Features : Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
In a career first, acclaimed Montreal painter Etienne Zack will debut his first large-scale, three-dimensional sculpture during the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.
The sculpture, Untitled Circuit (Name,Medium,Size,Year), is modelled after Zack’s 2008 painting by the same name. While the sculpture is a “purified” version of the original piece, he says the central idea is still very present.
“The [painting’s] perspective is distorted, there’s all kinds of colours and things that disrupt the space,” says Zack. “There are many different time periods within the same painting.”
Accordingly, the sculpture uses colourful items, ranging from pieces of furniture to typewriters, to text and imagery from art magazines, to convey its message. Zack says Untitled Circuit (Name,Medium,Size,Year) represents the ways that cultural systems, like the art industry or the sporting industry, are produced and given meaning in society.
“The sculpture is based on the production of anything. In this case it is art-making and art distribution and art promotion,” he says. “I’m talking about making a work, and then writing about it and the whole industry of curating and talking about the work and pushing the work.”
Before beginning a painting, Zack usually makes small sculptures in his studio that would act as inspiration for his paintings. He often uses found objects and his own artists’ tools to build the models. “So basically what I’m doing now is inverting them.”
Although this is the first major sculpture Zack has produced, he says many of his paintings could be made into sculptures or installations.
“A lot of the paintings I’ve done are done, kind of, as sketches for sculptures. They’re very sculptural,” he says. “A lot of people say they’re quite surreal, but actually, they all could be sculptures.”
“Untitled Circuit (Name,Medium,Size,Year)” will be showcased at Five-Sixty, 560 Seymour Street, Vancouver from January 28 to February 28, from 11 am to 6 pm; free.